What Color Will Need to Win Us Over: Creativity

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Color, the brand-new but already controversial free mobile app released on iPhone and Android devices today, has already turned off plenty of potential users. What does Color do? It taps into your GPS to find your location and shares photos that you took with other usersany other users, not just your friendswho are within a 100-foot radius. It's voluntary in the sense that you have to download and install the app in order to use it or be included in what other people see, but once you're in, you're in, with little ability to limit who sees what.

Guardians of online privacy have been shaking their heads all day. Meanwhile, eager early adopters are throwing their privacy concerns to the wind and snapping photos left and right of anything at all (and from what I've seen, little of substance; such is the elation to try the thing out).

Color's First Wheel
I got a look at it today in the PCMag labs while fellow product reviewers startomg putting it to the test (look for the full review on PCMag.com very soon). Someone handed me a phone, and I could instantly see a film strip of images of, well, I'm not sure whom. They must have been other office workers down the hall or in the floors above or below us. Whatever photos they took using the Color app appeared within moments on the very phone I was holding .

Later, someone reported overhearing in the building lobby that our neighbors at CNET could "see into the PCMag lab" because a number of our photos had the PCMag logo front and center (rather than a person's face). Still, it was mildly unnerving, and in office spaces users will need to be sure that nothing proprietary is within view.

A number of us have been debating the usefulness of the app. Why would anyone use this? What value does it have? How will the developers make money from it? And why did venture capital investors already back the app with $41 million? For the potential advertising revenue?

A World With Color
While I'm highly skeptical so far, the creative optimist in me can imagine a world in which Color takes off based on one big thing: imaginative user-generated content.

Color very obviously is trying to take the popularity of Facebook's photo-sharing features and expand it into something totally new that pushes boundaries.

When Facebook first launched, only select college students had access to it. When it finally did open up to everyone, part of what made Facebook succeed was that it was already populated with a ton of content: people, their interests, their relationships to other people, and of course photos. If Facebook had been available to everyone before it was pioneered, so to speak, most people wouldn't have been interested in settling the land themselves.

Color isn't going to be interesting or useful until users quash their initial scurrying to get something, anything onto the app just so they can try it out, and instead flip on their creativity and test the waters in earnest. Will Color be turn into something like ChatRoulette: promiscuity with proximity? Users do have the ability to report an image that's inappropriate with the swipe of a finger, but the potential for dating or meeting up with people nearby is huge, despite whether they keep their clothes on in their photos.

Might it be like a visual reinterpretation of Twitter, where people can spot trends as they happen, or alert others of impending danger, in the crush of a riot for instance? The possibilities are limitless, but I'll be waiting on the sidelines for inventive people to start trying some of them out.

Given the speed at which early adopters innovate these days, I don't think it will be long until we see some real creativity popping up. I give it two days at most. Color has already been accused of being an app for voyeurs, but until real content appears, the rest of us don't have anything to be voyeuristic about.

Jill Duffy is a contributing editor, specializing in productivity apps and software, as well as technologies for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on how to lead a better digital life. Her first book, Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life is available for Kindle, iPad, and other digital formats. She is also the creator and author of ProductivityReport.org.
Before joining PCMag.com, she was senior editor at the Association for Computing Machinery, a non-profit membership organization for...
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